Some thoughts on many eggs in one basket

Yesterday was horrible. So many of my recent promotions, and my newest product, depend on PaydotCom for processing, that when that service went down for a good part of the day, it brought my product and affiliate sales total down to a low it hasn’t seen in a long, long time.

A few days ago I spoke with an JV broker who suggested picking just one solution for my product sales, and I was leaning toward Paydotcom as the one I’d choose.

But now that I think about it, I might decide to diversify a bit. No, I don’t mean Clickbank. I can’t stand buying stuff from Clickbank, so I’m not anxious to sell using that service.

But I do have a licensed copy of Post Affiliate Pro that I’ve been using to run the affiliate program for Conversionary. I’m thinking I might just move that to a more generic domain name and run all my programs from it.

That way, I’ve got one less layer of services that can go awry. My own host can go down, but that could happen anyways. But if Paydotcom or Clickbank goes down, I won’t be affected… at least for my own product sales.

The other thing I’ll have to include in my plans in the future is to ensure that the products I promote in any given time period are not all using the same service to process credit cards or run affiliate programs. That should keep the income flowing … albeit reduced… when any one service or website is inaccessible.

I’m not saying anything bad about Paydotcom. What they do is great. And outages happen at Paypal, Clickbank, even banks. So the best thing to do if you rely on affiliate or product sales income is to mitigate the risk when (not if, when) one of the common services go down.

In a similar vein, a bug was found in Public Domain Explorer recently that crashes the program when the Library of Congress search is unavailable. We’re working on a fix now.